Warsaw, Poland

Cognitive Science

Master's
Table of contents
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⇑Cognitive Science at UW

Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: humanities
Kind of studies: full-time studies
University website: en.uw.edu.pl

⇑Test: Is Cognitive Science the right fit for you?

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10 questions · two minutes

1. Why do people remember some faces for years and forget others within seconds? How do you approach a question like that?

2. You’re designing an experiment on attention. What matters most to you?

3. How do you feel about learning to program, for example to analyse data or build simple neural network models?

4. Your classmates come from psychology, computer science, linguistics and philosophy, from many countries, and all classes are in English. How does that sound?

5. A language model writes fluent text. Does it understand what it’s saying?

6. You’re asked to record EEG or eye-tracking data from participants. How do you feel?

7. A popular article claims we use only a small part of our brain. How do you react?

8. How do you feel about reading research papers from several disciplines?

9. Where can you see yourself after this degree?

10. What motivates you most to pursue a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science?

⇑Definitions and quotes

Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. The fundamental concept of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Science
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science
I was particularly interested in that, in working on Jurassic Park that aspect of what are the negative parts. Because in talking with the people who were doing this kind of research what I was hearing was that the most responsible of them were deciding not to proceed down certain lines of inquiry which is really a new phase in science. Traditionally in science what the scientists themselves have said is: "I might as well do it, because if I don't, someone else will. It is going to happen inevitably." I think there's recognition now, that it's no so inevitable and it's quite conceivable that if I don't do this research neither will anyone else. It's simply too dangerous.
Michael Crichton, interview Lost World section of Beyond Jurassic Park DVD.
Science
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Sir Ernest Rutherford from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), 26.
Science
The men in the laboratory... cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all. ...The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. ... What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
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